|
Posted on 06.12.07 by skintari @ 9:56 am
Hello everybody, It’s been awhile since I posted, as I’ve been on vacation. But I’m back now with an all new review! First off, Tiberium Wars (Command & Conquer, like 45..) is a good game. If you are a fan of the RTS or if you’ve just enjoyed a previous C&C game on the pc, then you will like this game. I say that, because I’ve only played a couple of the pc games and have always had fun with them. By no means am I swayed by the name itself or the genre, they’ve just been entertaining to me! Alright, on to the game facts! TW works well on the 360. The controls are fluent and the game play hasn’t lost anything in the transition to the console. Most of the commands can be activated using the trigger buttons, and you still maintain control over your home base while in the midst of battle. Using the sticks give you the same versatility as using of a mouse to scroll over troops or to view the map and the a/b buttons work as well as mouse clicks. The graphics, to me, are equal as to what you’d see on a pc. Although, I think they did a fantastic job on the actual cutscenes. If you have a “hi-def” setup, you can certainly tell that they put a lot of effort into the quality of the scenes. I think this adds to the overall viewing of the game as I found myself wanting to watch them in between the battles. Another thing to note is that they actually brought over all of the actors to resume their rolls in the series. They also added a very special guest. I will not divulge who that is, as it was a treat when he strolled onto the screen! Now, onto the bad. One of my biggest gripes of this game is the squad selection. There are some instances when you want to select a few troops. In order to do this, you have to hold the left trigger and select the troops with the A button. This can be a little flaky and you either end up selecting too many troops, troops that you did not want to select, or it’ll just give you directional arrows (which I do not understand what they do at this point because it’s all relatively point and click). The only correction would be to reselect the armies you want. This doesn’t take a long time, it’s just frustrating when it happens in the middle of battle and you’re trying to bring in reinforcements. This issue is so sporadic that it doesn’t necessarily effect game play, it’s just a hassle every once in a while. Another problem I have with this game is the menu to see your current missions. The way it works now is that you have to hit the back button to go into the mission archive. I wish that they had put it as an overlay screen instead of pausing the game to review what is left to accomplish. And finally, the building process can be a tad tedious. Once you have a building ready to be built, the game makes you cycle through your commands to actually build it. It would be a bit more fluid if it would just select the building automatically when it’s available. Most of my complaints are cosmetic and do not necessarily hurt the game play. In fact, These are really the same complaints that I’ve had with the pc versions as well. So with that being said, I really encourage gamers to give this one a shot. It’s a good game and is quite fun, even if you’re not a true RTS fan. Plus, you’ll enjoy the special guest in the cutscenes, I promise! I give this game a 4.5/5. It’s worth a rental to see if you like it! And definately worth buying if you do! Filed under: Review and Xbox 360 and skintari Comments: None |
|
Posted on 05.22.07 by skintari @ 9:43 am
Here’s a little game that came out, courtesy of D3. It’s the Americanized version of “Genocide Grand Prix” (Japan). This game costs about $10 and you can find it at just about any local game store with a tad bit of looking. I definately recommend picking it up for the sheer thrill of it! So, what is Drive to Survive you ask? Well, it’s not a very good game. The graphics are dull and common, the camera can mess you up, and the AI can be “too good”. But the fun of this game is the multiplayer! It’s your basic 3rd person racing game. The difference is that you have weapon pick ups that you can use on your “enemies”, ala Twisted Metal. The cars handle like a wet sock, but that sometimes works to your advantage. The game is not very deep either. There’s 3 tiers of single player racing with about 15 different tracks. Once you beat that, there’s not much else. But the multiplayer is the meat of this game. With 3 friends over, you can spend hours blowing each other up. Every time I have played the multiplayer, I have ended up in tears from laughing so hard. It is that much fun! Overall, this game is a 2/5 for single player. But the multiplayer is definitely worth a couple extra points…..so it gets a 4/5 for that. My recommendation is if you see this game, it’s worth the few bucks to pick it up!
Filed under: PS2 and Review and skintari Comments: None |
|
Posted on 05.15.07 by skintari @ 9:57 am
I know, that title prolly doesn’t seem like something you can wrap your head around, but wait! don’t skim past this article! I’m talking about a new game called Puzzle Quest. This game comes a referral by Beuks, so you know it’s gonna be classy. The basic premise of the game is a combination of the online fan favorite, Bejeweled. The difference is the rpg twist that it has incorporated. Now, this may seem a little absurd, but the game actually flows nicely. You start off by creating your “character”. The choices are pretty basic, warrior, knight, “magician”, and druid. You really only pick the sex and makeup, no additional features can be changed, but that’s not what this is about. It’s about gameplay! So you start off in the center of the map with a standard rpg story line. Go see your father, go check out different towns, and so on. Once you begin, you can stop at the tavern and get some helpful clues. Then you start the training. It takes awhile to understand everything that’s going on, but once you do…..look out! The battle sequences look something like this….  If you notice the different colors, those are for your spells and weapons. Once you have collected the sufficient amount, you can cast damage or protection. Each character also has it’s own unique set of items that they can use. During this battle, you can also collect mana (money) and the purple bursts are used to boost your experience. The skulls are what inflicts damage onto your opponent. That’s pretty much the jist of the battles. Once a battle is over, you can return to the castle where you can spend your money on various weapons and upgrading you castle. You can purchase things like a forge which gives you the ability to make “super weapons” and specialty items. Some buildings also let you capture creatures after beating them in battle 3 times. The way to capture a creature is buying completing a puzzle. Some of these are easy and some of these are hard. But they are pretty fun. The only negative is that the game can get pretty overwhelming on some of the battles. Some of your enemies cast spells that gives them like 8 turns and the whole time you just sit there and watch your life drain. Other times, there will be only one move you can make, which then opens the board up for the enemy to make 4 in a row. I wish the AI would have been a little more forgiving with this. I can’t tell you how many times I had an enemy down to 6 or 7 hit points and mine was above 20 and I still lost the battle. But overall, a very fun little time waster, especially if your a fan of rpg’s. So, all in all, I’ll rate this little guy a 4/5. I think it has a ton of replay value with each character and, of course, it is bejeweled! Filed under: Nintendo DS and Review and skintari Comments: None |
|
Posted on 05.11.07 by skintari @ 10:14 am
As you can see, it’s a very basic principle and that’s what makes it so fun and addictive. I never spent more than 5 minutes on any one puzzle and there was enough of a challenge to keep me wanting to play one puzzle after another. Not to mention that we’ve just started playing the game and are already up to about 130 puzzles. There are also a few different types of challenges. Each day you can do your daily fortune, which gives you 4 categories you have to complete. Health, Work, Romance, and Money are the fortunes. Each one gives you a different response based on how well you perform the challenge. There is also a Rapid Play. This is a timed game that you have to find one difference between the pictures. At the end of each round, it assesses your judgement, intuition, concentration, recognition, and stability. It then rates you at the end of each round on how quickly you completed the challenges and how well you drew your circles. The head to head function is good for a few laughs as well. In the download play, if you find yourself behind, quickly tap the lower right corner to cover your opponents screen with frogs or other wacky things. This gives you a chance to catch up, not only by screwing up that round for them, but also the next one as they will still be laughing over the giant frogs. There are 2 other multi-player games, yet both people would need the game so we didn’t get to try that out. All in all, this is a great little time waster that’s a lot of fun. Think a WarioWare puzzle game. The only real downside to this game is that there is no hint or help function. While it doesn’t degrade the game at all, it would have been nice to include as some of the puzzles can be quite busy. But, after a try or three, you can usually pick out that one thing you looked over for the past 5 minutes! My score on this is a solid 4.5/5. Definitely, worth picking up and extremely hard to put down once you do! Filed under: Nintendo DS and Review and skintari Comments: 4 Comments |
So I got my copy of Quickspot yesterday, thanks to Gamefly. Let me tell you, this is a must have, folks! This game is about finding the 10 differences between two identical pictures. There’s really not much else behind it, but the game never really gets stale. The artwork is fantastic (with quite a bit of humor thrown in). I’ve seen everything from hidden “pac-man’s” to the Prince from Katamari.|
Posted on 05.09.07 by skintari @ 12:11 pm
Bullet Witch! Here’s a game that was originally developed as a japanese game and recently ported to the U.S. The premise is you (a witch), with a gun that is just a tad bigger than your entire body, must defeat throngs of undead soldiers. Obviously, you can use your gun to kill them, or you can use “magic”. The reason I put magic in quotes is that it’s not like fireballs or lasers that you can shoot from your hands, it’s magic that you can use to push a car into a bad guy, or heal people, or put a wall in front of you to stop incoming bullets. While not entirely helpful, there are basic points that you have to use your magic. For instance, when you battle the tanks in the first level, you have the ability to rain down lightning. One aspect about this is when you go to your magic screen and select the lightning, you end up mysteriously moving backwards to actually use it. It took me about 4 tries before I was able to lock on to the tank as it kept putting me out of range. Another downfall of this game is the enemy. The AI was stupid. That’s to say it nicely. They also tend to blend in with the background. What was nice during the game was that since I couldn’t see the enemies all the time, they would give themselves away by shooting directly into the ground. Thanks, bad guys! Another reason why it was hard to see the enemy was because the surroundings would always tend to be in your way. When running along a line of bushes, there should be no reason why you can’t see through them. I can’t tell you how many times I ran along a path of foliage only to turn a corner and run into an enemy either shooting into the ground or standing there as dumbfounded as I am. Which leads me to my final point. The gun itself is slow and awkward. The aiming has to be directly on the enemy to inflict any damage, which, in itself, is difficult because the controls seem to move at different speeds. There are 2 aiming mechanisms. The first is traditional 3rd person and the second is a 1st person view. I found myself constantly “left-clicking” between the two, as it was hard to maneuver around the screen with one set viewpoint. Not to mention the enemies that would randomly pop up next to you during gameplay. One last quick add is that there is no true jump. When trying to get over a car, ledge, random obstruction, you hit the left trigger to do some aerobic spinning and twisting before you actually go airborn. If I wanted my character to do that much exercise, I would have rented DDR. Now, I know this is pretty negative for my first review, but there are some pluses for this game. You definitely don’t have to think too much and you can’t get lost as you’re on a set game path. Additionally, the lead character is easy on the eyes! But all that can’t take away from the poor quality of the game itself. This is one game that feels rushed and poorly put together. That’s a shame, cause the idea is pretty kickass. My vote for this game is 2/5. Could be so much more if it spent a little more time in development tho. Filed under: Review and Xbox 360 and skintari Comments: None |
| « newer posts | previous posts » |
